Theology lesson

Adopting the name Theo might imply some desire on the part of Terry Quigley to create a sense of anonymity, some mystical mystery even, but he has a more earthly explanation.
“Theo is just a nickname I picked up from the family. It seemed less of a mouthful than using my full name.”

And the Red Beats? Who they?
“Get What You Came For actually started out as a solo project. I played guitars, keyboards and did loops and programming. But I’d worked with Peter Eades in One Half Monk, so he added various instruments and agreed to produce it and serve as the quality control department. Peter and I share the same ideal in that we both like quality recordings. Brian O’Reilly added drums and others did vocals and voices. Brian had worked with Peter as a session player, so it all came together by one connection linking with another. A lot of the material was at least partly written before we put anything down. I did some pre-production, mainly vocals and guitars, before taking it into the different studios we used, including my old man’s warehouse. In one sense the album was a bit of an orphan, a lack of budget making us move to anywhere they’d let us in!”
Following the dissolution of One Half Monk, his first grown-up foray into music, Theo spent a while dabbling quite successfully in the movie scene.
“I spent the last couple of years involved in a social justice film production company called the Video Action Fund who are based in Washington DC. I lived there for a few months at a time, but I did most of the work from Dublin. I had a friend who was involved who had asked me to write some short music scores for them and to large extent that work prompted me to look at putting a band and this album together,” he explains.
That film experience was not wasted on said album either, as tracks like the U2-ish ‘Hello Tokyo’ have a widescreen approach both musically and lyrically, and there’s a contemporary cinematic quality running through the album.
“There wasn’t a plan to make it seem like that,” he concedes. “But that’s probably the kind of music I instinctively wanted to make, so it’s not really surprising that the album has that cinematic quality. Some of the music scores I did for the Washington project evolved into songs.”
Then there’s the track ‘Barfly Hustle’ which is set in a doctor’s office, on which the male and female spoken voices are so convincing you suspect that they’re samples lifted from actual films.
“No,” Theo reveals, “we actually got real actors to do those passages for us. I’m a big fan of Tom Waits and he has a song called ‘What’s He Building’ on the Mule Variations album that was a big influence on me in the way I approach some of the music on Get What You Came For. I love the way he uses the voice and the mechanical sounds to build a picture. So for ‘Barfly Hustle’ we got Fiona Bell and Conor Mullen, who are good friends of ours and who both live in Ireland, to act those lines. I’d started with lyrics that were kind of stream-of-consciousness, but as I worked it took on a shape and a sense, so it’s not gobbledegook. It paints pictures and I think it really works and we’ve since done a video for it.”
The lyrics on the album generally eschew the obvious routine of boy-girl stuff. ‘Ammunition’ is a serious indictment of modern materialism with the opening verse declaiming “For the tired wives all bitchin/for the central custom kitchen/only serves as ammunition/only gives more ammunition for the kid who wakes up screaming” is unlikely to cut it in Eurovision, so what’s Theo’s line on lyrics?
“I tend to like phonetics, the way words sound rather than just thinking only of what they mean. The sounds of the words have to merge with the sound of the music. But sometimes a melodic idea might come first and then it’s a case of finding words that work with the sounds. I have a fondness for big sounds, sometimes even if it goes into a sort of brash overkill which can be very exciting too, but the words and sounds have to work as a unit,” he believes.
So what next for Theo and The Red Beats?
“We need to work on getting airplay. Today FM’s Tony Fenton picked ‘This Is Not An Emergency’ as an essential download, so that track and ‘Ido’s Dog Fight’ will probably be released as singles. ‘Zero’ is another track we’re looking at. We’re also planning live gigs. We’re doing the Jamboree Festival at Punchestown in August with Aslan and Noise Control, and we’re also negotiating for some Italian festival spots in the early Autumn. This has all been a great learning curve for me, and I’ve no doubt there are further lessons ahead. But that’s where the fun and the challenge is.”